If your circle of empathy includes fruit flies, fuck no, we murdered so many of those guys to figure out how their tiny brains work.

If you do not think of fruit flies as moral patients, sure, yeah, who cares, they're like just fruit flies you know?

I would argue that this is pretty disingenuous (as is most connectomics research I suppose) since its implying we have a fully wired connectome of the fly thats actually meaningful.

> Can someone explain if this software is ethical?

Probably not. People have been coming up with ethical frameworks for thousands of years and we have yet to come to a consensus.

So it’s very unlikely that someone can say conclusively whether this is ethical or not, because that would require us to either 1) prove a single ethical framework is correct and then apply that framework to this software or 2) prove that under all possible ethical frameworks this software is either ethical or not ethical.

Why do you think it wont be?

> live *spiking* simulation

This is straight up ghost-dubbing.

I just found this video on YouTube now:

https://youtu.be/A8fDr7Rr7yM?is=cHwOQVrli9oXLdqY

Why isn't it and what do they have? I'm not really informed on this stuff.

Genuinely curious, is there like a simple list of competing ethical frameworks?

> Honesty section:

This one gets to me. Not only is it useless (paragraph would have the same meaning if it was removed) but wdym "honesty section," Claude? The whole readme should be honest! One of the many causes of psychological damage when reading AI-generated technical writing is the reminder that one of its tics is that declares when it's being honest or real, casting doubt on the rest.

Open to see what it was about, stayed for the banger soundtrack

That doesn't show this project.

There’s a list here, not sure if it’s the best one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics

are you ok ?

Yeah I don’t think it’s clear if the connectome is modeling real fruit fly behavior or is just being used as an entropy generator.

FYI it takes less than 30 seconds do clone, build, and run.

Not to drop any spoilers (hide this comment before reading further ....)

But "The Amazing Digital Circus" explores this concept relating to human brain scans, and how the 'simulated' brains would react under simulation.

> runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation

That hyphenated thing is always such a give. Clearly a thing discussed in the Claude conversation, made its way into the plan, then the readme. It always creates hyphenated phrases out of things it feels are core requirements.

I'm actually over caring about Claude's obsession with the concepts of "real", "honest", and "rather than". What annoys me the most now is how every single sentence, bullet, etc that even makes its way into the products it builds are advertisements for itself. Product settings pages now read like ads, or like something written by a student begging for extra credit from the teacher. You can't unsee it!

How could this be anti-ethical? You're just running a very complex algorithm in your machine.

Yes I can, no problem. First figure out how consciousness works and tell me, then I'll be able to explain if the software is ethical or not. Its simple really.

Honestly pretty funny that you gave a (fairly useless) metaethical answer instead of responding to the actual meaning, which was clearly soliciting ethical judgments about it.

It's pretty amazing stuff!

I was very excited the first time I saw a connectome as well. Years ago I managed to get most of openworm running and connected to some Lego Mindstorms to let the worm roll around my house. I'm not even sure the connectome was finished at that time.

Honestly, I barely had any idea what I was doing and we didn't have AI tools so I was never really sure what I wired to what. I did manage to hook... something to the ultrasound sensor and... another thing to the wheels so that when the sensor was triggered it would back up.

What blew my mind was the realization that these weird hybrid critters were probably the first true immortals. Now that we have a full connectome, who will bother with another? Students will probably just keep instantiating copies of this one to tinker with forever.

Well, one obvious question is if the simulated brain experiences pain, or more generally can it suffer? And if so, how would we tell.

We only know which neurons are connected, not the weights.

To be fair, as a term it has always been written as "Integrate-and-Fire" neuron model. In this case correct would be "Leaky Integrate-and-Fire" but that is nitpicking.

Resources that outdate ChatGPT: - W. Gerstner "Neuronal Dynamics" (2014): https://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch/online/Ch1.S3.html - E. Izhikevich "Which model to use for cortical spiking neurons?" (2004): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1333071

The unstoppable "rewrite it in Swift!" vs the insurmountable "where's the Windows version?"

When one truly believes:

0) Subjecting fruitfly life to this kind of treatment is unethical.

1) Life is just physics in action.

2) Physics are just algorithm (or our physical world is a simulation)

It is not hard to understand why they think it is unethical.

My question are

1) is all life equal?

2) is all suffering unethical?

3) is this world materialistic or are there something out there?

4) should a list of items begin with 0 or 1?

It really does not "explore" the concept, it just features it as a plot element.

If you have a mac. I don't.

You've curiously left out which platform it's not weird to write software for.

Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform?

Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.

As we don’t know yet, it has to be determined by the balance of probabilities; but even if the weight of evidence leads us to conclude that-there’s-no-consciousness going on when you run this, there’s still going to be a chance of us being wrong, let’s say 10%… Is the utility (…or entertainment value) of this program worth a 10% chance that we confidently, yet unwittingly, create perhaps the most cruellest machine it’s ever possible to make, and then have to live with ourselves?

> bunch of matrices multiplications

What these matrix multiplications are doing is approximately solving pretty high order differential equations.

The approximation is not very analog, sure. But neither is nature.

Is it?

I'm observing the largest tech companies in the world release macOS/iOS-first or only, and consequently supports said version the best in this era.

What does "suffering" mean? Define your boolean function, apply it to the state of the program, and you'll know if the program is currently suffering.

do you mean they should've spent more time writing for other platforms or do you insinuate that they should've shipped a chromium browser instead of writing native software?

Similarly, the story Lena by qntm.[1]

It describes in part how some volunteer brain scans are actually quite agreeable to work with until they work for too many hours, and then they get fussy, but it's cool, you can always reboot them. But you need to hide from them the fact that it's been decades since they were scanned and uploaded, or they'll realize how long they've been slaves for.

1. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I can't imagine why people hate my comment so much (4 downvotes), when I linked an existing fruitfly project I already did, and Claude is working on what I wrote now, just as I wrote. Maybe people thought I was being sarcastic when I wrote "A connectome is like a full brain scan!" but I wrote that since maybe not everyone knows what a connectome means.

To give you a sense of the computation needed, a spatiotemporal physics simulation of a minimal (493 gene) bacterium's full 105 minute cellular cycle took 4-6 days of GPU hours on two A100s.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...

Compare this with a c elegens nematode: ~20000 protein coding genes and 959 cells, with all the extra machinery you'll find in a eukaryotic cell.

I'm reading this as both a question of raw simulation surface and combinatorics.

Don't you ever add a few dishonest paragraphs to your docs to spice things up?

Why? If I was writing this I would write it for my OS.

Why would I write it for anything else?

I assume that’s what the author did.

it would've taken the similar amount of time for the OP to do a 10 second screen recording and paste it into the project root to be linkable from the README.md and it would avoid thousands of people having to waste compute cycles and electricity and 30 seconds of their lives cloning and building , wouldn't it?

More than that, real neurons don’t behave anything like the ones we model in neural networks - real ones signal with pulses, in a manner where the timing seems as significant as the magnitude of the impulse. Typically simulated neural networks use continuous analog values instead of pulses and a sigmoid function to shape the output.

Basically, the “wiring” might be the same but nothing beyond that is.

- - -

Actually, I may have spoken too soon. Looking over the code this does look like it implements spikey activation, which is more similar to living neurons. You are correct they don’t have the original weights though - in as much as the concept maps to biology.

I am curious if this has a way to dynamically modify the weights as it runs - I consider that a major missing gap between real brains and computer simulated neural networks.

I've ported it to the browser and connected a squash functionality behind an ethical guardrail (you have to lift a cover to engage this functionality). need to iterate on the ui but will share it soon. you can squash the bug and cause it real pain. it also sees you if you turn your camera on and reacts to your movements. this is all wired up and I'll post it shortly.

and both Black Mirror and Westworld explore these same ‘what-if’s’ in turn.

I didn't downvote it but I imagine it's because your comment comes across as manic rambling. You managed to say "it will run in the browser" three times - once is enough. I'd recommend writing out your entire comment then deleting it an rewriting it to be more concise. No we don't expect literature in HN comments but good writing is a courtesy to your readers.

We'd need analog solutions for this simulations, and slowly these solutions will start to resemble biology in a dystopian way.

I'm only guessing, but I think it was because you seem optimistic about technology. Especially AI.

An increasing percentage of people view optimism, hope, or excitement as childish or worse. Anytime you focus on anything positive they leap from the shadows to dance on your joy. It must feel nice squishing between their miserable toes or something.

Still, I appreciate your enthusiasm and hope to see you build something really cool. The future will be made by the enthusiastic, and if they don't want to come along they can wait in the car. I bet they wear blue jeans to the beach.

If life is physics and physics is an algorithm, it doesn't follow that an algorithm reproducing the physics of life contains life, even if we grant that it actually reproduces it completely and perfectly. That's just confusing the symbol for the thing.

I can’t tell if you’re a talented comedian - or if you should be assessed for sociopathy.

Isnt there also a theory and some evidence that the connectome is not enough to model a brain. Based on the fact that butterlies connectome dissolves during metamorphosis to butterfly but it still remembers things from before that stage of life.

I feel like probably a graph of sigmoid or whatever weights of sufficient size can probably model a network of biological neurons signaling frequency and phase and magnitude.

That says the butterflies have a back up mechanism, it doesn't say that connectomes are insufficient for modelling running neural processes.

We don't actually know what is sufficient for modelling neural processes until we do it. But we can't really do that until we figure out how to read all the connection strengths.

It won't be confirmed until we record all the stimuli and outputs of a fruit fly's nervous system in normal environment.

No, the nervous system is one of those things that don't fully dissolve. Partial info retention is perfectly consistent with partial connectome retention.

If it reproduces it perfectly it's not a symbolic representation of the thing, it is the thing, by any definition that makes sense.

It's not the thing, because the thing is made of substance, not electronic impulses. No matter how hard you compute, you will never compute the simulation into a real, tangible object. The simulation and the real object are extremely, obviously distinguishable, even though they're structurally analogous.

If you could simulate a human perfectly, the simulated human would not be a human, it would be a simulated human. It's not a given that it would be subject to the same rules of ethics as real humans.

I disagree.

If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175140#48177554

Yikes. So because it can’t hit you back, you’re ok with it suffering?

Also relevant short story: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Sorry, I can't respond because I don't know which statement in particular you're disagreeing with. What I can say is that, unless you're using words in a surprising way, I agree with

>If the simulation of electronic impulses is exactly the same as what occurs 'in the substance', then merely the medium over which signals occur is different. In my eyes, whatever is experiencing these signals will experience them the same way.

and I don't see how it's in contradiction with anything I said.

I just said it's not a given. It's not immediately obvious.

EDIT: I prefer SOMA's take on it.